This blog is about some of the things in my life that I enjoy doing - Zentangles®, cycling, and needle crafts. Hopefully you will enjoy the variety and may it encourage you to begin or follow your own adventures. Welcome, Donald Wilka

Pages

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Some more new things: Finished shadow box with tangled insert

I am not sure if I posted something earlier on here or it was on the CZT FB page about these shadow boxes that I got at Hobby Lobby. Was not sure when I would get around to doing anything with them. I was able to work on them sooner than I expected. Here is a picture of one of the shadow boxes before any thing was done on them. The box is about 2.5" square.

Was not exactly sure what I wanted to do with them. I thought of painting the box and then tangling on that. That would be a lot of work and was not sure that I wanted to tackle that right now. When I first saw them my first thought was that I could do a tile to put in the window. That is what I decided to do. I still wanted to do something with the box itself but did not like the idea of painting them. I decided to just varnish one of them and the other two I stained first and then used Tung oil as a finish. here is what they looked like when done with this process.

The lower right is the natural finish. Did not show up as well in the picture. The stain is pretty light and I did not let it soak into the wood for long because I wanted the stain but not something that dark.The stain is a Minwax product, Golden Oak.

For the inserts I used Bijou tiles. I had to trim a little to fit into the window and as you will see later, some of the tile is hidden because of the size of the window. Here are pictures of the tiles I did.

I realized after taking the picture that you could not really see them that well. Here are pictures of each one individually with a few comments about them.

This is the first one that I did. The color is done with layered Prismacolor pencils. Was pleased with the way that it turned out.

This was actually the last one I did . Wanted to do more of a traditional tangle tile. Used Cubine and 'Nzeppel as the tangles. I did use layered Prismacolor pencils again to add the color.

For this last one, I started out doing a water color wash. I used Faber-Castell pencils. I liked the wash but was not sure wanted I wanted to do. When I originally looked at it with the blue on the sides (sorry, did not take a picture before I started tangling on it). Was not too taken with it. I began rotating the tile and noticed on the one orientation the blue looked like sky and water and the middle section looked like hills. I liked that but was still not really sure what I wanted to do. Was not sure what tangles I could use. I admit, I was also worried about how it would look. Anyway I pushed ahead and used the brown Micron for most of the work except for the lower blue section. Does not show up but also used as a white Prismacolor pencil to try to put in some clouds in the top section of blue. I was pleased with the result. Here is what the finished tile looked like.

Used a tangle from Sandy Steen Bartholomew's "Totally Tangled" book Swell. For the hills, I used Diva Dance and a Shattuck style stroke. I decided to leave the sky and the one section untangled. I hope you enjoy it and hope I did not add too much to it.

Okay, enough rambling. Here are the finished items.

Think they turned out well.

I appreciate your patience if you got all the way through this post. I have some other new things that I am working on but they are not ready post. Combined a little tangling with pyrography. Stay tune to see those.

Thanks for visiting. As always, comments are welcomed, encouraged, and appreciated.